


flawed work of art

by pomegrenadier



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, background Batman, grim optimism, i have no idea what this is, overwrought metaphors, seriously what
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:57:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pomegrenadier/pseuds/pomegrenadier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gotham is not a nice place. It's still worth fighting for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	flawed work of art

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Snow Patrol's "Take Back the City."

Gotham is a grimy, dank, stinking growth on the eastern seaboard. It smells like exhaust and metal, smoke and despair, the refuse of a few million people clinging to life in a city determined to destroy them. The sky hangs low and swollen with dark clouds, sickly with the reflected light of its jagged spires. It's clammily cold, too, except when it's hot and sticky as oozing tar, or drenched in miserable rain. It is storm-wracked, ice-bound, drought-stricken. Never mild, never pleasant.  
  
There are too many shadows, too many sharp angles, too many gargoyles snarling out over the dully humming street lights and choked alleys. There are too many bodies in the river. There are too many rats in the gutters and bullets in the walls.  
  
But there's a reason people stay, beyond desperation or necessity: Gotham is a cruel, ugly city, but it is not a city without hope.  
  
(In some distant might-be, may-be, the dark holds no fear for the city; she is no Metropolis of graceful towers and gentle sunshine but she has a hard, brutal beauty all her own, and the pride to go with it. She glitters, hoards her light and smiles with teeth of concrete and steel. She thrives—no phoenix she, no purifying fire, but rising nonetheless from the dross and the decay, a creature with vast black wings.)  
  
In the shadows lurk monsters and madmen.  
  
In the shadows lurk heroes, too.


End file.
